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Elektroschock writes "According to Russian media, the Russian Government is going to develop a National Operating System (Google translation; Russian original) to lower its dependencies on foreign software technology licensing. The Russian plan will base its efforts on Linux and expects a worldwide impact. Microsoft is also involved in the roundtable process that led to the recommendation. The Chinese government successfully lowered its Microsoft licensing costs through an early investment in a national Linux distribution. I wonder if other large markets, such as the European Union, will also develop their own Linux distributions or join in the Russian initiative."

I spent some time in Russia, although I have not been overly studious about Russian history. My understanding is that, during communism there were no goods in the stores. Now, there are plenty of goods, but no one can afford to buy them.

I also get the impression that your average Russian has no desire to do the kinds of things that Americans would see as necessary to help the economy (start a small business, take risks, etc), because of the assumption, which is fair given the last 1000 years or so, that someone will just come in and take it all away and/or destroy it.

Of course, these are just the impressions of a stupid American who only understands the Russian Soul to the extent it can be taught in a language class, and didn't take much Russian history. I could be way off.

I also get the impression that your average Russian has no desire to do the kinds of things that Americans would see as necessary to help the economy (start a small business, take risks, etc), because of the assumption, which is fair given the last 1000 years or so, that someone will just come in and take it all away and/or destroy it.

You know, we Russians have an old joke. Here goes:

A guy dies and ends up in hell. Before his punishment is due, he's shown around to know what is awaiting for him. At one moment, he and his demonic guide pass by three large foul-smelling pits full of dung.

One pit is bustling with activity - people climb out there every minute or so in large groups, and there are several demons with pitchforks running around the pit pushing the climbers down. The demons are sweaty and obviously tired.The second pit is mostly quiet, but occasionally a single guy pokes his head outside, and immediately gets pushed down by a young lone demon, who is otherwise standing there yawning.The third pit is absolutely quiet. There is a very old demon with chipped horns lying near the edge snoring and cuddling his pitchfork in the sleep. However, no-one climbs out of the pit.

The guy looks at all this for some time, and then asks what it is all about. His guide explains:

"The first pit is for Jews. They always stick together and help each other, and as soon as one climbs one step above the others, he stops and helps them get up to his level.The second pit is for Europeans. They're hardworking, but individualist and way too proud of themselves, so they all climb alone, each on his own.The third pit is for Russians. As soon as one of them climbs even a little bit higher than the rest, those below him pull him down by the legs into the dung so that he knows his place."

It sounds more like "make a big public showing that they are working on switching to license, then wait for the Microsoft Rep to show up 15 minutes later and offer much larger discounts on MS products"...

It apparently matters to someone, since China apparently got the price lowered as well. I have to wonder if it was worth all of the international hooplah to reduce the price of the single copy of Windows they bought.

There is the official Russian stance for the international community, and the understood stance of some people who live there (and what they think of copyright and licensing).

Careful not to confuse the two. This statement on developing a national operating system came from the government, which knows it needs to at least outwardly appear to play by the rules of the rest of the international community. Conversely this likely won't mean squat to the spammers who are offering you dirt-cheap "windows downl

I find the Russian attitude toward copyright to be mostly refreshing. They do want to give incentives for people to make a little money from creative works, but there isn't the perpetual and infinite lifetime to creative works that seems to be prevalent in western Europe and has infected legal circles within the USA.

The way that Russians treat copyrighted material of others is pretty much how they want to have their own content treated. At least they are consistent in this manner. It certainly doesn't compare to the blatant copyright infringements that happen in China.

It matters at least on the surface. The "big deal" is being a member of the WTO. You can't be a player in the WTO if you are branded as a thief. The other kids won't want to play with you!

But, just as Ernie Ball, moving away from Microsoft is a good plan and illustrates perfectly now they are not as necessary as people think. But invariably, people are lured into taking the "easy" path... not changing and settling for a lower price and incentive to stay. "Lower price" is not the only incentive, of course... but officially, lower price is the incentive.

....You can't be a player in the WTO if you are branded as a thief. The other kids won't want to play with you!

I think this statement sums up the WTO fantastically well. It's a club for schoolkids, pretending to be important. They are all thieves, but you don't want ALL of the rest of them calling you a thief. As long as it's only one or two of them, you're ok.

Johnny trades me marbles at a good deal because I have a good supply of bubble gum that he likes. Sure, I trade it to other kids too, but I need the marbles so Johnny and I trade on the side. I think the playground is a great analogy for the WTO.

No no no. This is a great ploy to keep the costs of operating systems low, and to standardize. It's a jab at Microsoft, but also to others with high costs (read Solaris, IBM's long list, HP's long list, etc.).

And if it works, and puts pressure on other OS makers to do better, so much the better.

Will we want to code in RussOS? Why not-- if there's a good reason to.

Copyright etc. is a form of planned economy:
"Ppl won't create the *correct number of books/movies/etc. unless the government 'incentivizes' the production thereof by enforcing the creators' exclusive rights to copy/modify/etc."
*where "correct" is determined by said government...

"Ppl won't create the *correct number of books/movies/etc. unless the government 'incentivizes' the production thereof by enforcing the creators' exclusive rights to copy/modify/etc."

*where "correct" is determined by said government...

I don't understand where you get this idea. Copyright at its most fundamental level is a legal enforcement of proper attribution. Don't claim to be somebody who you are not, and certainly don't assert that you wrote something or made something when you had absolutely nothing to do with it in the first place.

Are there abuses of copyright? Absolutely! Many of the major media distributors (RIAA members, MPAA members, ASCAP members, and members of other similar groups) assert and claim rights they simply don't have, or in a few cases are able to get political mussel to get laws changed in their favor that don't make sense. Just look at DAT (Digital Audio Tape) and see how the recording industry ruined a perfectly find and indeed useful technology through boneheaded legislation.

Protecting the actual artists, composers, writers, producers and filmmakers through copyright for a limited time is for me something very useful, and something that I personally depend upon for my very livelihood. The problem comes when limited time == forever, and the rights of those who have purchased or received a creative work are trampled to death and declared non-existent. Among those include the right to use the work of art as you please, to be able to enjoy and share that work with others, and to review and express your opinion about that work of art.

Copyright law sets limits about what these right might be, and establishes a way to provide incentives that date back to the 18th Century and earlier. Unfortunately, many of those drafting copyright legislation today are not familiar with nor understand the problems that happened in the 18th Century that led to current copyright laws in the first place.

Open source is people working for common good by producing something that is available for anyone to use as they need it. It is very much communism.

The only reason why it is used as a negative argument (only in USA as far as I know) is that the propaganda there seems to make people automatically do the connection "The ideology equals all the wrongs that the governments committed while trying to achieve it"...

But it is neither propaganda or joke that open source fits very well to the idea of communism. The o

Maybe pure politicians don't, but somebody at least at the EU is trying to do something about it, look, they have released their own Free/Open Source Software Licence (sic): http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7774 [europa.eu]
Anyway, I think they could have just used gpl or whatever other copyleft license, but i guess at least they are indeed promoting an EU-wide open-source policy;)

If it detects you making unfavorable comments about Putin it send your address off to a mailing center where they send you a free "gift" package of Polonium-laced tea (Earl Gray, of course, to increase the chance of computer geeks drinking it).

Very interesting. A lot of FOSS uses the GPL as a tool to prevent closed-source, copyright-dependent companies from freeriding on the FOSS and contributing nothing. Of course, the GPL can't really be enforced against a state actor.

So, what to do about a state that takes GPL software, modifies it, redistributes it, maybe even charges for it?

doesn't anyone realize that reinventing the wheel is sometimes a good thing? Goodyear does it all the time, makes millions on the results, and for good reason: they're solving different problems. if you need to get to the corner store and back, sure, what they've been producing for decades will do you, but if you're driving an Formula1, or IndyCar, or military HMMV, you have different constraints and want different results.

sure, they could take some existing distro and package good cyrillic fonts and some customized skins and admin utilities. but what would that do for their local software industry? how would that make them significant to the rest of the world?

Why any country would voluntarily base their national security on imported, closed-source, non-free software is beyond my reasoning.
If a country wants to control its infrastructure, it must use free software. Same goes for us computers users, too, of course, but the stakes are much higher for a sovereign nation.

Do you think countries that don't have their own automobile, airplane, computer, food industry are sacrificing some weird notion of security?

Hell yes. For example, America doesn't have any energy production to speak of. As we've seen in grisly detail on the 6:00 news, there's a price to pay. Many African nations don't grow their own food, and instead are dependent on American aid. There's a price to pay. We don't make our own electronics here in America anymore, and instead are dependent on cheap Chinese cr

Software(and, to an extent, high complexity hardware like ASICs) are special cases because the gap in transparency between source and binary is quite high, and because, with the complexity of software, there is a huge amount of room to hide potential nasties(or not bother to hide them, as with most DRM schemes). With most other commodities, by contrast, the finished product can't hide much of anything nearly as easily.

Seriously, not being dependent on foreign companies for critical national technological infrastructure is in the strategic national interests of every nation on earth. If you are a foreign nation, how do you know that the OS you are getting from $OS_Vendor doesn't have 'wiretaps', back-doors, remote kill switches, or other secrets in the software which $OS_Vendor, or the nation to which $OS_Vendor is based out of, can use to cripple you? Another problem is, that $OS_Vendor could simply stop providing you with necessary patches to update known problems and vulnerabilities in the OS.

One possible solution would be, if you are using a closed-source vendor, to require that vendor to provide the government with buildable source code, which could be reviewed by your own Computer Scientists, then built by your government, and distributed throughout the nation. This also allows your developers to provide your nation with patches and support if you are cut off from support from $OS_Vendor. That is not true Open-Source, but that is still, effectively, a "National Operating System". Open Source is one step better though, because you have, potentially, a lot larger base of people that are reviewing the code. That whole Eric Raymond thing to the effect that with sufficiently many eyes, all bugs are shallow.

Just saying that some foreign leader that is not well liked has something in common with another leader is sort of mis-leading, because there will often be many things in common between good leaders and bad leaders - what's important often isn't the similarities, but the differences.

What the article actually says, is that some members of Russian parliament are just _proposing_ to develop a national OS. M$ representatives, on the other hand, say that it is not a national OS which Russia need, but to make use the technologies which are already exist. so, don't get excited just yet - there are many things they talk about in Russia.

This is a national linux distribution. The net result is that Microsoft loses more customers, that's significant, but it's not like Russia is coming up with something from scratch. If they run with Open Office on this distro, that will also be significant. The whole idea of trying to divorce themselves from dependence upon western software is also interesting.

In Russian stack structures, they will not follow LIFO. Instead it will be Last In achieves resource starvation, First In gets out first.
Reverse Polish Notation will hereby be called Forward Russian Nota

The article says that this is an idea, raised by some random people and it is only being organized and will be later offered to president Medvedev as a proposition.
Calling it a fact, as the summary did, is so yellow press it hurts.

Oh I wonder if they are using this to reduce the pricing of MS licenses or if they really thought about it? If they really thought about it, they could just translate every out of english into russian and recompile everything. That the US uses MS Windows is the biggest reason for Russia to chose to use anything else. Preferably they want a domestic Russian company being MS or IBM. They don't want to clone windows or linux. They want their own Russian developed thing.

I can totally see why Russia would want to have this happen... at least their own distro for use internally within the Russian government.

Developers - By directly sponsoring a complete distro, they have their own developers who are both actively engaged within the greater Linux community, know the kernel cold (there certainly are Russian programmers who can be and are even now developing software currently in the kernel), and have their loyalties to the Russian society even if not directly to the Russian government. This means Russia has the developer base to keep up with the rest of the world in a critical area.

Security - If there is anybody paranoid about security, I don't know who is worse than the Russian government. The only way to have a genuinely secure operating system is to review each and every line of code that goes into that OS by somebody both with the skills necessary to properly evaluate the software, and the loyalty to the organization necessary to fix things that seem out of place. See also the above point, which is even more critical here.

Meeting local needs - by having a group that is embedded within the Russian culture that certainly is not a part of the Silicon Valley culture, they have a much better grasp of what is needed for their own local society. While working with Cyrillic characters isn't that much different from Latin characters, this is but one situation where local support is desperately needed. Interfacing with older Soviet systems is certainly an issue as well... I can only imagine some of the compatibility issues that would have to be worked out there.

National pride - There is also a little bit of national pride on the line here as well. Having something "made in Russia" is powerfully attractive for a number of reasons... at the very least to show that your country is able to keep up with the best and the brightest on the planet. Of all the reasons I've listed, this really is the least significant, but the one most head-smacking obvious and ultimately the one that would best sell to a legislative body that has to pay for any significant expenses to get this project going. I certainly doubt that Russian citizens are going to be upset with a modest expense being directed in this fashion through their tax dollars.

A top to bottom review of the Linux kernel from another group of developers with a completely different interests, backgrounds, and motivations than other major contributors to Linux would also be a very good thing for the development of Linux as a whole. I wish Russia the best on getting this accomplished, and I hope that their success is huge.

It isn't like the American government doesn't do this too. The NSA (National Security Agency... aka the USA cyber spys) has their own distro for most of the reasons I've listed above, and has nearly continuous recruitment going on at college campuses for CS graduates. The Red Flag distro (Chinese) is another national distro that has been done for more than just pressuring Microsoft into lowering the price of Windows.

Frankly, I see Microsoft's involvement here as a red herring and something to ignore for this discussion.

This is disappointing given that Russian strength is in mathematics due to the same phenomenon that drove their launch vehicles to exceptional performance:

A lag in micro electronics development.

Basically, Russians had to be more intelligent with their algorithms than the West due to their inferior hardware. This puts them in a position to be superior software architects who should not be taking their lead from the West -- not even from Finland as much as I respect Linux.

Let's just hope that RusOS operates a little better than Russia itself. Otherwise:

-The menus will contain every feature ever planned for RusOS, but none of the ones that are actually implemented.
-During times of heavy load, the scheduler will block all processes from using the CPU, to prevent deadlock.
-Users of RusOS will frequently and loudly proclaim how horrible it is, and will angrily chastise you if you agree with them.

[...] when TSHTF, they'll hire some Germans to work 24/7 for a month and it will be awesome, if austere. [...]

Depends. If T-Systems get involved (and seeing how many people they have in their pocket they would get a slice of the cake) we'd be better off just staying with Windows. Or moving to Red Flag Linux and providing free Chinese classes to the whole of the European population. In either case we'd end up with a usable system cheaper and in less time.

Actually, this is the perfect place for the EU to work with Russia. It provides the possibility of improving relations in case either Putin or anyone who comes after him change their attitude and might help to bring about that change. The nice thing about using open source (assuming they honor the GPL) is that there is no true dependency on either side. In the event that either side chooses to stop sharing resources, the other side has the source code. The only way the EU could be burned would be if the

Yes, yes, I fully expected to get (-1, Redundant). Personally, I hate how overused the "In Soviet Russia" meme is but, in this case, I just couldn't resist. I figured the programming/OS tie in might add a, somewhat, new spin to it.;-)